How Well Are Your Emails Performing?

It’s hard to determine the success of an email marketing campaign without tracking key performance indicators. But which details are worth tracking and what do they tell you about the effectiveness of your campaigns? Here are seven metrics to get you started.

1. Email deliverability: This is the percentage of emails that reach recipient inboxes. To keep deliverability rates high, focus on maintaining a clean database and consistently provide useful, engaging content.

2. Bounce rates: “Soft bounces” occur due to temporary server problems and may be deliverable later, but “hard bounces” indicate invalid addresses that should be removed from your list. Too many bounces can make you look like a spammer to service providers.

3. Open rates: This metric can be misleading because emails aren’t counted as opened if the recipient doesn’t have images enabled. Other factors influencing open rate include the strength of your subject lines and familiarity of your sender name.

4. Click-through rate (CTR): This is the percentage of recipients who click a link in your email. To improve CTR, segment lists and provide personalized content and calls to action.

5. Click-to-open rate (CTOR): This is the percentage of clicks to email opens. CTOR  eliminates the variables associated with open rates and drills down to the success of the actual email content.

6. Conversion rate: Landing page conversions are the ultimate goal of your email campaigns. If you’re getting a high percentage of click-throughs without conversion, your landing page may be to blame.

7. Unsubscribe rate: Subscribers opt out for a number of reasons, but if you see this number spike, it may be time to reassess your content strategy.

Of course, your choice of email metrics will depend on the goals of your campaigns. Choose wisely to gain the insight needed to fine-tune a successful strategy.